and most honest work that author ever gave, were in part also founded on the quicksand of his treacherous connection with men, reckless, ill-judging, and, though perhaps not in intention dishonest, perpetually trading on their secret partner's industry and fame. In the great commercial crash of 1825, Constable, the publisher of most of the novels, was involved; he dragged the Ballantynes down with him; and the whole of Scott's fortune, except his appointments and the little settled on his wife and children, was liable for the Ballantynes' debts. But he was not satisfied with ruin. He must needs set to work at the hopeless task of paying debts which he had never, except technically, incurred, and he actually in the remaining years of his life cleared off the greater part of them. It was at the cost of his life itself. His wife died, his children were scattered; but he worked on till the thankless, hopeless toil broke down his strength, and after a fruitless visit to Italy, he returned, to die at Abbotsford on 21st September 1832.
Scott's poetry has gone through various stages of estimate, and it can hardly be said even now, a hundred years after the publication of his first verses, to have attained the position, practically accepted by all but paradoxers, which in that time a poet usually gains, unless, as the poets of the seventeenth century did in the eighteenth, he falls, owing to some freak of popular taste, out of really critical consideration altogether. The immense popularity which it at first obtained has been noted, as well as the fact that it was only ousted from that popularity by, so to speak, a variety of itself. But the rise of Byron in the long run did it far less harm than the long-delayed vogue of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the success even of the later schools, of which Tennyson was at once the pioneer and the commander-in-chief. At an uncertain time in the century, but comparatively early, it became fashionable to take Scott's verse as clever and spirited improvisation, to dwell on its over-fluency and facility, its lack of passages in the grand style (whatever the grand style may be), to indicate its frequent blemishes in strictly correct form and phrase. And it can hardly be said that there has been much reaction from this tone among professed and competent critics.
To a certain extent, indeed, this undervaluation is justified, and Scott himself, who was more free from literary vanity than any man of letters of whom we have record, pleaded guilty again and again. Dropping as he did almost by accident on a style which had absolutely no forerunners in elaborate formal literature, a style almost absolutely destitute of any restrictions or limits, in which the length of lines and stanzas, the position of rhymes, the change from narrative to dialogue, and so forth, depended wholly and solely on the caprice of the author, it would have been extremely strange if a man whose education had been a little lacking in scholastic strictness, and who began to write at a time when the first object of almost every writer was to burst old bonds, had not been somewhat lawless, even somewhat slipshod. Christabel itself, the first in time, and, though not published till long afterwards, the model of his Lay, has but a few score verses that can pretend to the grand style (whatever that may be). Nor yet again can it be denied that, acute as was the sense which bade Scott stop, he wrote as it was a little too much in this style, while he tried others for which he had far less aptitude.
Yet it seems to me impossible, on any just theory of poetry or of literature, to rank him low as a poet. He can afford to take his trial under more than one statute. To those who say that all depends on the subject, or that the handling and arrangement of the subject are, if not everything, yet something to be ranked far above mere detached beauties, he can produce not merely the first long narrative poems in English, which for more than a century had honestly enthralled and fixed popular taste, but some of the very few long narrative poems which deserve to do so. Wordsworth, in a characteristic note on the White Doe of Rylstone, contrasts, with oblique depreciation of Scott, that poem and its famous predecessors in the style across the border; but he omits to notice one point of difference—that in Scott the story interests, and in himself it does not. For the belated "classical" criticism of the Edinburgh Review, which thought the story of the Last Minstrel childish, and that of Marmion not much better, it may have been at least consistent to undervalue these poems. But the assumptions of that criticism no longer pass muster. On the other hand, to those who pin their poetical faith on "patches," the great mass of Scott's poetical work presents examples of certainly no common beauty. The set pieces of the larger poems, the Melrose description in The Lay, the battle in Marmion, the Fiery Cross in the Lady of the Lake, are indeed inferior in this respect to the mere snatches which the author scattered about his novels, some of which, especially the famous "Proud Maisie," have a beauty not inferior to that of the best things of his greatest contemporaries. And in swinging and dashing lyric, again, Scott can hold his own with the best, if indeed "the best" can hold their own in this particular division with "Lochinvar" and "Bonnie Dundee," with Elspeth's ballad in the Antiquary, and the White Lady's comfortable words to poor Father Philip.
The most really damaging things to be said against Scott as a poet are two. First, that his genius did not incline him either to the expression of the highest passion or to that of the deepest meditation, in which directions the utterances of the very greatest poetry are wont to lie. In the second place, that the extreme fertility and fluency which cannot be said to have improved even his prose work are, from the nature of the case, far more evident, and far more damagingly evident, in his verse. He is a poet of description, of action, of narration, rather than of intense feeling or thought. Yet in his own special divisions of the simpler lyric and of lyrical narrative he sometimes attains the exquisite, and rarely sinks below a quality which is fitted to give the poetical delight to a very large number of by no means contemptible persons. It appears to me at least, that on no sound theory of poetical criticism can Scott be ranked as a poet below Byron, who was his imitator in narrative and his inferior in lyric. But it may be admitted that this was not the opinion of most contemporaries of the two, and that, much as the poetry of Byron has sunk in critical estimation during the last half century, and slight as are the signs of its recovery, those who do not think very highly of the poetry of the pupil do not, as a rule, show much greater enthusiasm for that of the master.
Byron, it is true, was only half a pupil of Scott's, and (oddly enough for the poet, who, with Scott, was recognised as leader by the Romantic schools of all Europe) had more than a hankering after the classical ideals in literature. Yet how much of this was due to wilful "pose" and a desire not to follow the prevailing school of the day is a question difficult to answer—as indeed are many connected with Byron, whose utterances, even in private letters, are very seldom to be taken with absolute confidence in their sincerity. The poet's character did no discredit to the doctrines of heredity. His family was one of considerable distinction and great age; but his father, Captain John Byron, who never came to the title, was a roué of the worst character, and the cousin whom the poet succeeded had earned the name of the Wicked Lord. His mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, was of an excellent Scotch stock, and an heiress; though her rascally husband made away with her money. But she had a most violent temper, and seems to have had absolutely no claims except those of birth to the title of lady. Byron was born in Holles Street, Cavendish Square, on 22nd January 1788; and his early youth, which was spent with his mother at Aberdeen, was one of not much indulgence or happiness. But he came to the title, and to an extremely impoverished succession, at ten years old, and three years later was sent to Harrow. Here he made many friends, distinguishing himself by obtruding mentions and memories of his rank in a way not common with the English aristocracy, and hence, in 1805, he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. He spent about the usual time there, but took no degree, and while he was still an undergraduate printed his Hours of Idleness, first called Juvenilia. It appeared publicly in March 1807, and a year later was the subject of a criticism, rather excessive than unjust, in the Edinburgh Review. Byron, who had plenty of pluck, and who all his life long inclined in his heart to the Popian school, spent a considerable time upon a verse-answer, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he ran amuck generally, but displayed ability which it was hopeless to seek in his first production. Then he went abroad, and the excitement of his sojourn in the countries round the Mediterranean for the next two years not only aroused, but finally determined and almost fully developed, his genius.
On his return home he took his seat and went into society with the success likely to attend an extremely
